Industry leaders reveal their strategy to increase engagement on branded content at the D-Code digital review in Mumbai

Positive stories, opinionated stories and calling out intolerable occurrences in our country are the three ways in which content engagement can be increased on social media, feel AIB’s Tanmay Bhat and Vodafone’s Siddharth Banerjee.

Speaking at a session of decoding successful content marketing campaigns and digital advertising, Bhat said, “To get traction on a branded story, opinionated content is the answer since people in India like to share their opinions and the comment section is the place where a brand can get to know its TG and their behaviour, in and out.”

“Indians also love content that reinforces nationalism and positivity and that’s the reason why most content creators celebrate any award that India wins,” he added.

While sharing his experiences of content marketing and digital advertising for Vodafone, Banerjee, who works as EVP with the brand, said that because of available data, Vodafone could identify the weak Airtel markets and converted this opportunity into strength by targeting Airtel users on every digital medium and hence stressed the importance of having a 360-degree approach.

According to Banerjee, Tiago’s tie up with TVF’s ‘Tripling’, a web series about three siblings who take a detour from their boring life and go on a road trip, was one of the best collaborations since, without Tiago’s car, the story wouldn’t be complete. Eventually, Tiago saw more consumers coming for test driving and this tie-up increased brand awareness by 20%. Banerjee concluded his presentation by saying, “When brands tie up with a content creator, they should ask themselves a simple question: Can the content exist without the brand? If the answer is no, then it’s not branded content.”

Both were speaking at the Advertising Club’s first edition of D-Code: The Annual Digital Review 2018.

Highlighting another successful digital campaign, Bhat spoke about how the Pyaar Ek Dhokha Hai campaign started with a random post on Facebook and ended up getting brands such as Zomato, Ola and TTT on board. It still remains to be one of the most interactive content ideas on digital media. Within four days of the launch of this campaign, Bhat tweeted, “AIB’s distribution network clocked nearly 100 million impressions in the last four days.”

Unquestionably, AIB’s content initiative changed the content’s ballgame and it will be remembered by every brand on Valentine’s Day.

More from this section

The video is a scene from the video series ‘What's your status' that the Indian beer maker giant launched in July on its YouTube channel Cheers. The viral rant is about the taxing hours and labour Indian employees put in the Indian corporate setup